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The AFCOE Complete Course is a comprehensive evangelism training program that will prepare you for an entry-level career in ministry or simply help you reach those close to you more effectively. This complete course will give you the skills you need to be a better soul-winner, with professional instruction from experienced soul-winners in counseling, personal witnessing, public evangelism, how to give Bible studies, preaching, and so much more.

Accident or Dilemma

Do you know how this world, the sun, moon and stars, and the entire universe came into existence? Astronomers tell us that there are 200 billion stars or suns in the galaxy, the Milky Way, and that there are 100 million other known galaxies. How did all this come into existence?

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Do you know how this world, the sun, moon and stars, and the entire universe came into existence? Astronomers tell us that there are 200 billion stars or suns in the galaxy, the Milky Way, and that there are 100 million other known galaxies. All right, answer my question: How did all this come into existence? No, don’t tell me that all the billions of giant suns evolved out of nothing, or out of star dust. If so, where did the star dust come from?

I have a wrist watch on my wrist right now. If I were to tell you that no one made that watch, but that it just happened, you would laugh me to scorn. You know that somebody made it. It did not just happen. That is an utter impossibility. Then, what about this complex universe? Take some of the smaller things. Take the rose and the orchid. Who put them together with their beautiful colors and fragrance? Did they just happen? You know better than that. Even the humblest wild flower that grows in the woods bears evidence of the design of a master workman.

No one would accept a modern collegiate dictionary as just an accident. Wouldn’t you lift an eyebrow if you were informed that it is not the product of thousands of hours of patient research, but that it simply came about as the result of an explosion in a modern printing plant? You would laugh at such inanities.

And what about the fine computers that work out the precise route of space rockets? What would be your reaction if someone told you that this electronic marvel somehow evolved from the ruins of an ancient Greek library, ready-programmed with all the wisdom of that golden age? I’ll tell you what you’d do—you’d question the sanity of that “someone” who told you such nonsense. But tell me, why is it that modern man cannot conceive of the accidental evolution of a rocket, or a computer, or even a dictionary; and yet he can attribute the marvels of the human brain, which created all these, to chance? Why is this generation so willing to believe that man, his marvelous body, his incredible brain somehow evolved through millions of years with only blind nature and chance to direct?

We know that a rocket had to have intelligent creation, and that its course must have intelligent supervision. But I ask you, friends, are the speeding galaxies of the heavens, in their precision pathways—are they out there in space only because of some celestial accident?

Scientists don’t seem to know exactly how our world originated—possibly from some cosmic explosion of the restless gases of the distant past. That is the supposition. And then, several million years ago, they say, life appeared in its simplest form, followed by the slow magic of the ages, the wonders of accident and chance, the reign of tooth and claw, the survival of the fittest. And at last, life and civilization and culture as we know it today—the crowning miracle of unhurried evolution.

But just how much are you willing to attribute to the unlikely magic of accident and chance? If evolution happened, how did it happen? Would it be unreasonable to ask some specific questions? For example, how did tiny creatures of nature come by the fantastic design which enables them to miraculously survive extinction? Did you ever watch the fascinating activities of the common honey bee? Have you ever noticed that the bees are incredible architects? The hive is a masterpiece of engineering, with rows and rows of six-sided rooms with walls of wax. This marble palace—we call it the comb—is built by young bees under seventeen days old. Yet each little room is the same size, six-sided, with three pairs of walls facing each other. The walls of the rooms are only two thousandth of an inch thick, yet so strong that a pound of comb will support at least 25 pounds of honey. Think of that friends—only as thick as a hair of your head.

How do these young bees know that the hexagon has the smallest circumference, therefore requiring the smallest amount of building material? How do they know that hexagon cells are the best and most economical construction? Who told them? Yet they do it all without blueprints or drawing boards or compasses. And every cell is perfect, just the size to fit a bee.

How do they do it? Well, they hang themselves up like a festoon from the roof of the hive. Or it may be in a hollow of a tree. One bee hooks onto the roof, and another bee hooks onto his dangling legs, etc. These chains of bees grow longer and longer, and as they sway, they hook onto bees on the right and left until they form a living curtain. Now they hang up like this to produce wax. You see, there are four wax pockets on each side of the bee’s abdomen. And after about 24 hours of hanging, wax begins to appear from these pockets. When a bee feels its wax is ready, it climbs up over the other bees, takes the wax out of its pockets, chews it, and pats it onto the comb. At first they just pile on wax. Then they form rough cups, climb into them, and push. And, of course, a lot of other bees are pushing at the same time.

The result—the perfect shape and the incredibly thin walls. And that’s the way the comb is built. Now this bees wax is a remarkable substance in itself, friends. It has the highest melting point of any known wax. This keeps it from melting in the 110 degree temperature of the summer heat.

But friends, the bees perform this work in perfect cooperation, as if their assignments were posted on a bulletin board. It must be a marvel of organization, you say. Yes, but who directs it? Who planted that incredible wisdom in the tiny brain of the bee? What engineer taught it how to construct a mathematically precise house which conforms to all the laws of science and nature? It almost seems that the bee has a computer brain which is programmed to building nothing less than perfect cells of wax.

There may be 40 to 75 thousand bees in a hive, or more, all working in perfect harmony, as a unit. But who is the leader? Certainly not the queen. The only time she exerts any leadership is when she is challenged by another queen and the bees follow her to a new hive. But otherwise, the queen bee is in reality nothing more than an egg-laying machine. In a single day she can lay 2,000 eggs. But she does nothing else, and their weight alone could be two to four times more than the bee.

Certainly the drones are not the leaders. These male bees are completely indolent. They are waiting for just one thing—and that is to mate with the queen bee when she soars off on her courtship flight. Only one in a hundred of the drones will ever make it. But what of the workers? They are the real marvels of the hive. Although they have no leader, each bee does just the right thing at the right time.

Bees need two things—pollen and nectar. Both are found in flowers. And as they fly off to the fields of flowers, they go marvelously equipped. In the first place, a honeybee is a fantastically engineered flying machine. Man-made freight planes can carry a payload of about 25 percent of their weight. But a bee can carry almost a hundred percent of its weight. The bee needs no propeller or jet. Its short, wide wings both lift and drive it. It can move straight up or down, or it can hover in mid-air. Its stubby wings fold in a split second when it dives into a flower. Or it can whirl its wings to cool the beehive.

The bee has three places for storing cargo. One is a tank inside its body in which it stores nectar. Then, on its hind legs, it has two storage baskets for carrying pollen. Imagine a freight plane with its load dangling underneath. Are these pollen baskets something that evolved because of a need? Well, man first wrote about the bee in 3000 B.C. It had the pollen baskets then. And it hasn’t changed since!

A bee can suck up a load of nectar in a minute. It takes three minutes for it to build up two bulging loads of pollen in the baskets on its hind legs. How does it do it? Well, the bee dives into a flower, its body picking up pollen by brushing past the pollen boxes. It splashes about in the flower, and the yellow powder clings to the hairs on its body. But no, it isn’t so simple. How does it get the pollen into the baskets? And how does it keep the pollen from blowing away in flight? The load must be moistened, pressed together, tamped down, and evenly balanced on each leg. But believe it or not, the bee does it—and all the while hovering in mid-air or hanging by one claw!

What kind of a brain does the little honeybee have? You haven’t heard anything yet. Let me tell you about the waggle dance. You see, when the hive stirs in the morning, there may be 10,000 bees ready to go out and load up. But where should they go? They wait patiently while perhaps a dozen scouts go out to locate the day’s plunder. When a scout bee finds treasure, it loads up and flies straight back to the hive. Here she goes through a peculiar performance. She gives samples of the nectar to the other bees and gets them all excited. Then, as they follow her around, she goes through a figure eight across the face of the comb. The angle at which she goes through the figure eight tells the others the direction of the field. But how far away is it? Bees are short sighted, and they fly high. They must know just how far to go before coming down to earth. So with each movement through the figure eight the scout executes a waggle dance by waggling her abdomen. The number of waggles in 15 seconds tells the distance to the field.

But the problem is not so simple as it appears. A field twice as far away will not be indicated by twice as many waggles, for the number executed is in reverse ratio to the distance. That is, the farther away the field, the fewer the waggles. For example, if it makes ten circles in 15 seconds, the field of flowers is 300 feet away. But if the scout moves in slow motion, say two circles in 15 seconds, the flowers are almost 4 miles away! Still more marvelous is the fact that the ratio will not be one of simple arithmetic, but a number indicated by a logarithmic figure. So the honeybee uses higher mathematics in directing the workers to the field of flowers! I say again, what kind of a brain does she have? Is this an accident?

I wonder if you realize just how necessary the honeybee is, not only to our economy, but even to life itself. Bees, you see, handle up to 80% of all the pollinating that is done by insects. To show just how important bees are in pollination, listen to this. As an experiment, one branch of a pear tree was tied with gauze so that bees could not get to it. The branch did not yield a single pear. Another branch, with no more blossoms than the other, but exposed to bees, produced 33 pears.

Now, of course, without plants and flowers, bees could not exist. But it works both ways. Without bees, plants and flowers could not exist. Without the plant kingdom there would be no oxygen, and the earth could not be inhabited. You and I could not even exist without the honeybee!

Now, did the honeybee, with all its fantastic equipment for its job, just happen? Through long ages? A little bit at a time? Well, think it through. Suppose the bee started out with wings that wouldn’t fold up to enable it to dive into a flower? How would it survive until it developed that kind of wing? What if it had no pollen baskets on its hind legs? What if it had the pollen baskets, but not the knee joints to press the pollen into the baskets, or the sense to know how to do it? What if it had no hairs on its body to collect the pollen—or the hairs but no way to comb off the pollen? What if it hadn’t developed a nectar tank—yet? What if it had no wax-making equipment—or didn’t know it was supposed to hang up in a festoon for 24 hours to make the wax come out? What if the wax would not withstand the high temperatures of the hive, as few waxes would? What if the bees didn’t know how to make royal jelly to feed the queen—and the queen died? What if a bee couldn’t find its way back to the hive—or back to a field of flowers?

The questions fairly tumble out. They are endless. I think you can see that any one piece of the bee’s physical equipment would be completely useless without all the others. To be of any use whatsoever, every bit of the bee’s equipment and know-how would have to have developed simultaneously—all at once—and instantly.

Or if evolution happened, consider this. That very first bee, away back there, sitting on the limb of a tree. What kind of bee was it? Was it a queen? But a queen could not survive without a whole colony of bees to feed her, and a drone with which to mate. And the drones have no other reason to exist except to mate with the queen. So they could not have come first. In fact, they could not exist without a queen, anyway—they have no other way to reproduce.

If evolution is true, the bee of today had to gradually develop all the marvelous apparatus and skill to manufacture his food, his hive, etc.—which means that the first bee didn’t have all the equipment, such as nectar sac, pollen bags and wax makers. They, supposedly, evolved over the ages of primeval time. Yet, even the evolutionists concede that the bee could not survive without each of the intricately designed features that he possesses RIGHT NOW. The only answer to this dilemma is that God made the bee in the beginning, perfectly equipped and divinely programmed to work and live exactly as he does today. What a testimony to the truth of instant creation by an omnipotent Creator!